Last week while at the IEA I somehow wandering into a conversation on abortion and ended up chatting to a a pro-life Christian Libertarian. He asserted confidently that his position (that abortion should be illegal) was the only one consistent with the key ‘do no harm to others’ principle, and that if we are to…

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More government means less community. The horizontal ties, which bind people to each other, have slowly been replaced with vertical ties, which seek to bind individuals to the state. Society is weakened by this, because the government does a very bad job. And high taxes undermine philanthropic intention, and community action. The sheet vanity of…

Just as we cannot paper over the cracks and deny we have differences, we should not reject the values we have to offer one another over differences which do not relate to our purpose. The key, in my view is remaining focused on that purpose while choosing how to organise ourselves. We shouldn’t impose upon or reject one another if it does not support our goals.

Having libertarian views and living according to libertarian principles are two quite different things. The first is relatively easy, the second, much less so. There are many people who object to others exercising power over them and interfering with how they wish to live their lives, but it is much more difficult to allow others freedom and to refuse to take power over them. Yet, in my view, the latter is as necessary as the former for a libertarian.

Aside

i’m not an anarchist, i believe in government and a state of some form, but i believe that a culture that treats them as the enemy is both honest and healthy. and you know what, in a free society, people will fuck up, fail, and have a shit time. they still do in our over-governed society as well… it’s just that everyone has to tolerate a massive loss of freedom in our current situation.

it’s precisely because people are cunts that i feel like this. if people are cunts, why concentrate power in the hands of a minority??? access to which is decided by adherence to the rules of the media circus that we call modern democracy? i am 10079829209% more scared of Gordon Brown than i am of kids at the end of my road.

With Gavin getting increasingly involved with the running of the Libertarian Party, standing in Uttoxeter, and in the mire of the Party’s unique challanges, I thought it was about time We heard a bit more about him.

One of the strangest aspects of the Libertarian Party as an activist is that individuals use all pseudonyms online and rarely get together in person, so it’s quite common for activists to know very little about each other, how they earn a living and what got them into politics in the first place.